The café website checklist: 14 things every café site must have

A café website has exactly one job: turn a stranger looking at their phone into a customer walking through your door. Below is the 14-point checklist we run on every café project. Save it. Compare it against your current site. Anything missing is a leak.

What customers actually want

Before the checklist, the principle. The visitor on your café website is almost never reading. They're scanning for three things, in this order:

1. What do you serve? (the menu and a sense of vibe)
2. When are you open? (right now — they want to walk over)
3. Where are you? (and how easy is it to get there)

Every item below exists to answer one of those questions inside 5 seconds. If a visitor has to scroll, tap a menu, wait for a PDF, or pinch-zoom — you lose them.

The 14 essentials

What to skip

Just as important as what to include is what to leave out. These are the most common café-website mistakes — every one of them costs customers.

What to add only if you genuinely use it

• Online ordering for takeaway — Flipdish, Square Online, UberEats embed. Only if you do takeaway regularly.
• Gift cards — if you sell them, link to the buy page.
• Coffee beans for online purchase — Stripe or Shopify Lite for direct sales.
• Events calendar — only if you actually host events monthly.
• Newsletter signup — if you genuinely send something useful (new seasonal menu, opening hours for holidays).

None of these are required. Adding them when you won't maintain them is worse than not having them.

The 5-second test

Here's how to know if your café site is working. Open it on your phone in front of someone who has never visited your café. Hand them the phone with the site already loaded. Watch them for 5 seconds. Then take the phone back and ask:

1. "What kind of café is this?"
2. "Is it open right now?"
3. "Could you walk there?"

If they can answer all three in 5 seconds, your site works. If they hesitate on any of them, that's the next thing to fix.

What changes if you have multiple locations

Multi-location cafés need one extra thing: a clear location picker. Best UX is a single homepage with a list of locations, each leading to its own page with that location's address, hours, menu (if it varies), and reviews. Don't try to cram all locations onto one page — Google ranks each location page separately for "café near me [neighbourhood]" searches.

The 14 essentials apply to every location page. Don't make the second one a watered-down version of the first.

What this looks like done — and how we'd build it for you

If you'd like to see all 14 essentials in a single working example, our live Oak & Bean café demo ticks each box — every item above is implemented as a reference. Steal whatever ideas help.

For the full done-for-you version targeted at your café, our Web design for cafés service builds the whole thing in 5–7 days from €599. Same checklist, your branding, your menu, your photos.

A café website is not a brochure. It's a 5-second decision tool that runs on a phone in someone's hand. Build for that, and customers come.

One small thing — once you finish the checklist, send the URL to three friends and ask them to walk through the 5-second test. You'll find at least one thing you missed. We did.